VAULT EXTRA 2 DECEMBER 2022
AIR AT QAGOMA
Expansive and inspiring, Air, currently on show at QAGOMA, showcases more than thirty significant Australian and international artists’ works. Divided into five themes – Atmosphere, Burn, Shared, Invisible and Change – the exhibition journeys through the obscure, ethereal and vital element of air, and the dangerous, rapidly-warming condition of our vitalising atmosphere. Featured works include Ron Mueck’s monumental human sculpture In bed (2005) and Anthony McCall’s enveloping installation Crossing (2016), as well as multi- media presentations by Tacita Dean, Max Dupain, Rei Naito, Albert Namatjira, Rosslyn Piggott, and Tomás Saraceno.
For VAULT’s current edition, Issue 41 (Feb– April), Andrew Stephens surveyed Tomás Saraceno’s airborne sculptural installations and spider-web works.
Read More about the artist’s practice and current exhibition in Tomás Saraceno: Taking A Deep Breath.
Air continues at QAGOMA until April 23, 2023.
Image credit: Installation view Tomás Saraceno Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms, 2015-22 in Air, 2022 QAGOMA, Brisbane Aerocene spheres, transparent and metallic mylar, tape, pump with overpressure release, polyester rope, kinetic system, backpack, newspaper, pamphlets, books and photographic prints on paper Purchased 2022 with funds from the Neilson Foundation through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Courtesy QAGOMA / © Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Dario Lagana, Studio Tomás Saraceno
ACE GALLERY
A river that flows both ways: Selected works from the 23rd Biennale of Sydney: rīvus
Whilst understanding animals, plants, mountains, and bodies of water as ‘living ancestral beings’ has long existed in the philosophies and knowledge of Indigenous cultures, it has only recently been recognised – and subsequently protected – by formal legislation.
Directly engaging in this conversation rīvus (latin for ‘stream’), presented by Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE), in partnership with the Biennale of Sydney, explores the impacts of climate change and colonisation on First Peoples’. Featuring work by artists Aluaiy Kaumakan (Paiwan Nation), Yuko Mohri (Japan), Imhathai Suwatthanasilp (Thailand) and Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi (Tonga), as well as pieces from the Murrundi / Murray River, rīvus prompts an important reflection on Australia’s self-determination – as articulated by ancestral and contemporary custodians for centuries.
rīvus continues at ACE until March 4, 2023.
Image credit:Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi, Haukulasi, 1995–2021 (detail). Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from Creative New Zealand. Photo by Document Photography
GOVETT-BREWSTER ART GALLERY
Te Au: Liquid Constituencies
Te Au: Liquid Constituencies brings together artists across mediums for the sake of one shared sentiment: To advocate for the future of all living beings. With cut paper, weaving, stitching, drawing, stencils, moving image and Ngatu (a form of traditional Tongan cloth made from Mulberry tree bark), Bonita Bigham, Megan Cope, Erub Arts, Ruha Fifita, Taloi Havini, INTERPRT, María Francisca Montes Zúñiga, Angela Tiatia, Te Waituhi ā Nuku and Arielle Walker explore this sentiment with specific relation to water.
Modelled by the currents that flow through the many island nations surrounding the Australian coastline, the exhibition traverses the Taranaki, Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, to Te Ika-a-Māui, Horowhenua and the Kāpiti Coast, Antarctica and Patagonia.
Te Au: Liquid Constituencies continues until 20 March 2023.
Image credit: Kuku Biochar Project & Waikōkopu stream restoration. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Maija Stephens
HERVEY BAY REGIONAL GALLERY
Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise
Seeking to affirm the identities and experiences of those too-long overlooked, Badtjala artist Dr Fiona Foley reconstructs stories about her people and their histories in the current exhibtion Veiled Paradise. Pulling back the curtain to reveal centuries of colonial dispossession, racism, and sexism, Dr Foley sets the beauty of her ancestral landscape – K’gari country (Fraser Island) – alongside the dark history of structural violence and sexual exploitation committed on its shores. The survey exhibition, spanning over three decades of the artist’s practice, showcases print, paint, photographic, and sculptural works alongside film and original research.
Veiled Paradise is open Tuesday - Sunday at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery and closes February 26, 2023.
Image credit: Fiona Foley, The Magna Carta Tree #2, 2021, Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane. Photo: Mick Richards
MODERN TIMES
Play: Joshua Searle
Emerging Victorian artist Joshua Searle delves deep into socio-political commentary. Using bold lines and playful colour, Searl’s work evokes the brush strokes of the many remarkable street-artists who came before. His latest exhibition at Modern Times titled Play, features a series of nine large paintings that tower above the viewer, drawing them in to an enigmatic world of scribbled text and repurposed materials. Throughout the exhibition, Searle makes ‘critical observations about identity’, as he draws on motifs from Haitian-Puerto Rican-American artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as his Columbian heritage and childhood in his hometown of the Morning Peninsula, where he still works today.
Play opens at Modern Times February 16 and continues until February 26.
Image credit: Joshua Searle, Mariachi, acrylic, oil stick, oil pastel and nails on wooden assemblage, 101 x 114 cm. Courtesy of Modern Times
NICHOLAS THOMPSON
BODIES ON PAPER: 2000 TO 2011
BODIES ON PAPER: 2000 TO 2011 at Nicholas Thompson gallery explores the work of renowned Australian painter Gordon Shepardson (1934 - 2019). Presenting nineteen oil and enamel works from the early 2000s, the exhibition showcases his notorious painterly figures each seen to either sit in motion, float in darkness, or romantically bathe in light. Of these works, Nathan Shepardson writes, “[he] created these bodies you see with touch. All marks are direct from the fingers, metamorphic colour-chords laid down in a semi-improvised way to form limbs, eyes, gestures, and their mysterious reasons for being. They keep their shadows like pets. They seem to curate the debris from memory.”
BODIES ON PAPER: 2000 TO 2011 is showing at Nicholas Thompson Gallery until 18 February 2023.
nicholasthompsongallery.com.au
Image credit: Gordon Shepherdson, Friends in landscape, 2002, oil and enamel on paper, unframed 49 x 45 cm. Courtesy of Nichola Thompson Gallery
FOOTSCRAY COMMUNITY ARTS
These Bodies of Video Works
For artist Scotty So performance represents tragedy and humour as much as it does beauty self-expression. In their first solo exhibition – These Bodies of Video Works at Footscray Community Arts – So explores the relationship between performance and the performer’s body. Through mimicry and campness, So combines the classical with the contemporary to investigate themes of individuality, physical expression, and identity.
Scotty So, These Bodies of Video Works, continues at Footscray Community Arts until 14 June 2023.
Image credit:Courtesy to the artist and MARS Gallery.
